Rand said that she wasn't primarily an advocate of anything but reason, and that that -- being an honest advocate of reason -- existentially persuaded her to be a "secondary" advocate for a whole slew of other things, such as rational self-interest and free enterprise.
She said that the human 'entry-door' into philosophy was epistemology. Get into philosophy via the wrong door, and you are locked into wide-ranging errors -- errors that not only build or expand to specific things (like ethics or politics), but even to something more general than epistemology (i.e., metaphysics). She viewed the wrong metaphysics of most philosophers as an unintentional apologetic for all of their wrong epistemologies.
That's original to Objectivism: the full interconnectedness/interdependence of types or categories of human thought. Nothing is unrelated. Everything is integratable. The rational with the empirical, the moral (or the theoretical) with the practical, the ethical with the political, the epistemological with the metaphysical, (and so on, ad infinitum).
Philosophers before her often tried to integrate everything -- kind of like theoretical physicists have tried to integrate everything -- but they have all always failed (and she didn't). Their efforts, like Thales thinking that everything is just water, or Leibniz thinking it's all just "monads", or Hegel thinking it's all one Spirit; were doomed to fail either because -- to continue the "entry door" analogy -- they went through the wrong "entry door" into philosophy (e.g. starting with metaphysics instead of with epistemology), or they broke out of the rooms which that "very specific" entry door specifically leads into.
Ed
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